weilongli1

One thing that I have experienced and heard others mention during interviews last cycle was that seeing other people's bios and stats, etc. on here or on program websites makes it an extremely intimidating process. If I have any advice, it would be to ignore all of that. Talk to others and share your experiences, give and receive advice from each other, but don't spend hours comparing yourself to anybody else. Programs will not always select the students that look best on paper, nor should they. Focus on making your application the strongest it can be!

Adding on to what UTGC said, I would say that your dedication to get your degrees says a whole lot about you as a person. It's cliche, but from what I have seen, most people are firm believers in "Fall seven times, stand up eight." I would say this educational history makes your application better than people who had a more traditional route! I had Cs in some of my science classes as well - one coming very late in my undergraduate career, but they weren't held against me as much as I thought I they would be. Good luck!

I would advise against something like Coursera, but @slaybackc recommends, community college classes would be better. As for my personal experience, I took AP Psychology in high school, which covered the Intro to Psych class at my university, and the only psychology class I took while in college was Social Psychology.

Your GRE scores are only important if they are very high or very low. Otherwise, they don't make too much of a difference. My undergrad GPA was a 3.7, but without my second major in Theatre, it would have been ~3.4 which is roughly what yours is. It's not that bad of a GPA, especially with an upward trend, and with great LORs they shouldn't matter as much.

Some programs let you defer admission for situations like this. People understand that things happen in your life that might cause you to not be able to attend. Keep in mind though, things like a gap in your history might bring up questions for the admissions committee that you're going to have to answer when you apply again, but otherwise, I don't think it's that harmful.

Hey! I applied last cycle and will be attending Northwestern this September. I know last year I was freaking out about the process, and it was great to have people to talk to about this process with, so if anybody has any questions about applying/interviews/match day/whatever's on your mind, I'd be glad to help out, if you guys want it! @slaybackc I would recommend giving all your materials as soon as possible to her, and if you have more material, give it to her as it comes up. This way, she can start to think about what she wants to write about.

Congrats! See you there!!!

According to the thesis @SuitCase posted, and keeping in mind that this was data from 2005-2006 first year class, there were 4 programs with open spots and 7 total open spots out of 27 programs that responded. If the numbers hold, for 35 programs, there are ~5 programs with open spots, although I'm sure it changes year-to-year a lot. (If you wanna read the study, here's the link.

Congrats!!!!!

Congrats!

I really wonder which two programs are against it... it seems like it would make the process easier for everybody involved, rather than the one-at-a-time system where some people don't get calls until really late in the day. Edit: Actually, after reading some of the paper, some concerns that program directors have about an automated system make sense. I'm thinking some sort of hybrid system? Where schools still create their accept/waitlist/reject lists, but then an outside organization, like ACGC or something actually does the call outs, or manages the system? That way people still can't "game" the system or anything, but we could also try to limit the amount of cases where Applicant A is waitlisted at top choice School 1, but got in to School 2, while Applicant B is waitlisted at top choice School 2, but got in to School 1, or something similar.

Congrats! That's such good news!

Thanks! I actually just called them back and accepted the offer! Northwestern Genetic Counseling Class of 2018!

I drank 3 cups of coffee this morning... My heart was pounding so hard after. Bad decision on my part.

Started off the day with 2 rejections from SLC and Mt Sinai. Didn't interview at SLC, so that one was expected. Oh well. 2 down, 4 to go...